Talk:Packet switching
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Redirects: Packet Switching, packet switching
Kleinrock vs Baran/Davies
Kleinrock's apparent campaign to claim sole credit (his pages nowhere mention Baran) as the inventor of packet switching - and thus the Internet - is really sad, because he did make really important contributions. Initally via his incredibly fundamental queuing theory work, and later via other major contributions - e.g. his almost as important work with Kamoun on hierarchical routing (now critical to the operation of today's Internet), he produced key work.
However, if you carefully read both his initial 1961 paper, and the later 1964 book of his PhD work, it nowhere talks of breaking a user's message up into segments which are sent separately through the network. Yes, in hindsight, it's so obvious it doesn't seem important - but at the time, it wasn't obvious. However, in engineering terms this is a critical innovation - it not only allows better sharing of communication medium (e.g. lower latency) but it's also absolutely necessary if you use an unreliable network (now considered the way to go, because of the simpler overall system design), because if you expect to send large user messages (e.g. large web pages), the larger the message, the higher the chance it will be damaged in transit.
And as to claims that Baran's work was published in obscure RAND reports, and not generally available, that's clearly incorrect because a summary paper was published in a major IEEE journal - also in 1964.
In short, although Kleinrock did make key contributions, it's really wrong to leave out others who also did - and it's really sad, because he doesn't need to elide others to claim a major chunk of the glory. Noel (talk) 16:02, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)